This is sort of a thing, my friends.

And another thing! We will be co-teaching a session. This session will be called “I Love You, but You’re Wrong About Everything”. It’s basically going to be a father/son exploration of the fact that while both of us are deeply tired to Jewish life, have strong identities and a commitment to the community on a professional/personal level, we don’t have very much in common in terms of how we think of Judaism itself.

We thought about coming up with the content of the conversation on our own, but then we decided that it would be far more fun to crowdsource it. So we’re putting it to you, universe: what are the Jewish questions, ideas, conflicts and more that you would want to see my discuss with Carl, whether you’re coming to Limmud or not?

If you’ve got something, just throw it into the comments section and we’ll think it through!

(Note: some of you may think it would be funny to write something cute and snarky in the comments, something that you know we would never think about discussing. Please save everyone a couple minutes and refrain, since I’ll just remove it in moderation.)

• Detroit Metal City, volumes 1-8
• Bottomless Belly Button (cover price $29.99, light damage to the binding)
• Pride of Baghdad HC
• Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall HC
• Top 10: The Forty-Niners HC
• Hardware: The Man in the Machine TPB
• The Best American Comics, 2006
• Bone: The Dragonslayer HC
• Noble Causes Archives 1
• The Surrogates TPB
• Whiteout TPB
• Stormwatch: Final Orbit TPB
• Legion of Super-Heroes: The Beginning of Tomorrow TPB
• Sleeper: All False Moves TPB
• The Sentry TPB
• JSA: Justice Be Done TPB
• Batman: Broken City TPB
• Fight for Tomorrow TPB
• Hitman: Ace of Killers TPB
• Fear Agent Volume 1 TPB
• The Annotated Mantooth, signed by Matt Fraction
• Saga of the Swamp Thing Volume 1 TPB
• Stormwatch: Change of Die TPB
• Doktor Sleepless Volume 1 TPB
• The Tourist TPB
• The End League Volume 1 TPB
• The Exterminators Volumes 1-5
• The full run of Echo in trade
• Animal Man, Volumes 1-2
• Formerly Known as the Justice League TPB
• Frank Miller/Simon Bisley’s Bad Boy HC
• Hard Time: 50 to Life TPB
• Hellblazer: Dangerous Habits TPB
• Sandman, Volumes 1-3 TPB
• Spider-Man: Back in Black TPB
• Invincible Volume 12 TPB
• Transmetropolitan: Year of the Bastard TPB
• Ultimate Iron Man volume 1 TPB
• Stray Bullets Volume 1 TPB
• Seaguy TPB
• Crisis on Infinite Earths TPB
• Fables Volumes 1,2,6 TPB
• The Incredible Hercules: Smash of the Titans HC
• The Hood: Blood from Stones HC
• Catwoman “The Wild Ride” and “The Dark End of the Street” TPB
• Squadron Supreme TPB
• Persepolis Volume 1 HC

More than anything else, I’ll probably remember 2010 as the year when I sort of almost actually didn’t become a writer for the New York Times:

Of course I don’t write for the Times, but it’s a pretty incredible thing to find that something I wrote is being quoted at all, and by people that I respect. Discovering this a day before my 31st birthday was a nice touch, too. When I hit 30, I sort of asserted to all of my friends that I would start doing something related to comics in the following decade, to get to do a thing by 40. And while I’ve hardly won any Eisners (and I don’t really plan t0), it’s been one hell of a year. In March I finally got this here site going and not long after, I picked up my first ever paid writing gig at ComicsAlliance, at which point my life entered an endless stream of surreality as my favorite comics site become my employer and the people whose work I’ve been reading on the Internet for years turned into real people, and friends to boot. The whole thing has been incredibly exciting and humbling, and I’m totally grateful to new friends and anyone who has supported me on this stuff in the past year. I’m not doing a list of names, but you know who you are.

Thank you, twitter. You made it all possible. I feel weird about saying that, but it’s true.

Oh my god are you as bored reading this as I am writing it I don’t like doing this at all let’s talk about more interesting things than me like COMICS.

I don’t have a “Best of 2010″ list since I don’t really care about putting one out, but what I do have is a year of comics reading that includes stuff that didn’t just come out this year, and I’d be irresponsible to my own experience as a reader if I didn’t take the time to record at least some of it right up in here. I also have a Theory/Taxonomy that I will share. It is for the smiles. All in due time (next post), my friends.

I read a bunch of books this year that are worth remembering. First off is three different war comics.

Charley’s War

Charley’s War could easily be the most important comic that I’ve read all year, and this was most definitely a year of reading some war comics. There are two big things that really struck me about this comic. The first is that I came to realize that the only war comics worth reading are the ones that do anything but glorify war. There is always action, and combat is a necessary historical backdrop for the story, but what should lie at the heart of all of these stories is that war is always ridiculous, terrible. There may be justified wars, but there’s no good reason to suggest that warfare should ever be celebrated. Charley’s War does anything but. It’s a deeply layered takedown of World War I, from the industrial horrors of the war itself to the social inequities inherent in the prosecution of it. There was no honor in this war;  Pat Mills and Joe Colquohoun remind you of it every step of the way.

Oh yeah, what was the second thing that stuck me? Something that we should always remember about comics: simple presentation does not naturally imply simple content. Charley’s War is a very straightforward book, and without the appropriate historical context and understanding, you might be dumb enough to read it as the story of a guy in a war whose friends keep dying. Reading the collections with historical background, additional essays and commentary by the creators make the reading experience complete. Charley’s War is all kinds of historically accurate and this year I learned more than I ever have before about World War I simply by following the journey of one Charley Bourne through The War to End All Wars.

Blazing Combat

Blazing Combat blew my mind. This comic was so inherently anti-war that the army basically shut it down after four issues. The only thing this book has to say is that war is always terrible and people always die, and it attempted to say so while the U.S. was getting embroiled in the Vietman War. Most of the stories are written by Archie Goodwin, but are duties are handled by a whole mess of the greats, including John Severin, Gene Colan, Wally Wood and Alex Toth, Goddamn Alex Toth. This book is worth buying just for the 3-4 Toth stories. I wrote a bit about one of the pages in this book a few months back. You can check that out right here.

Johnny Hiro

I probably read this last year, but I read it again this year, so screw you. We all hit a point in our worthless salad days when we read something by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and we understood the whole magical realism thing and it made us feel thoughtful and cultured to have read 100 Years of Solitude and whatever except that as wonderful as it is, it hits so far from home. Fred Chao’s Johnny Hiro is magical realism for all of us, especially New Yorkers. He creates a city where everything seems possible, dinosaurs  roam the streets of Manhattan and if you want Michael Bloomberg to help you with something, all you have to do is call him on the phone. He’ll be there. Not counting last week and the blizzard and all that.

Johnny Hiro is one of the most relatable heroes that I’ve read in anything for a long time, probably because he’s nothing more than a guy who’s trying to get by and make his girlfriend happy in a city that seems committed to denying him the success that he dreams of. It’s pretty clear that whatever that success may be doesn’t truly matter, because he’s got Mayumi and she’s pretty much the best.

Other things that you’ll see in this book that seem perfectly natural on the streets of NYC: Giant robots, ninjas, Judge Judy and the cast of Night Court, samurai bathroom stall attacks. Do you need more convincing? This book is great. Pick it the hell up.

Blacksad

I’m one of those people who fully digs anthropomorphized animals, but I don’t dig it in the creepy way, which leaves me with very few outlets, but my limited options are made of pure quality. Blacksad is some classic hard-boiled noir business, reminiscent of the best detective fiction. The three stories in the hardcover I got my hands on deal with racism, communism, Hollywood dirt and The Bomb, and they’re all fantastic. This book also has some of the best art I’ve seen this year. I was gonna do a thing on one of the pages from this book as a “Perfect Pages” post, but then I realized that every page in this book is perfect. The key to a good anthropomorphic story for me is the facial expressions, the body language, matching the right species to the right personality. It’s all here. It’s not for creepers, it’s for people with taste.

Market Day

My favorite book of the year that didn’t involve ninjas, punching, superheroes or anything of the like. Market Day is a comics masterpiece, and a landmark work of Jewish storytelling. Anytime it comes up that I’m Jewish and I’m into comics, someone inevitably asks me if I’ve read Maus. My hope is that sometime in the very near future, people will default to asking me about Market Day, because this is the book they should be reading. I wrote a gushing ode to it over here.

Yeah, I don’t like Maus that much. I didn’t really like X-Force in the 90′s, but for some reason, that doesn’t bother anybody as much. Don’y ask me why.

King City/Won Ton Soup/Orc Stain

Before you bother reading any of this, check out what David Brothers has to say about King City here and here and here.

My favorite thing about fiction in general is the notion of creating universes. The best works of fiction for me, realistic or otherwise, do a really good job of creating a compelling universe for me to get into as quickly as possible. That’s easily my favorite thing about these comics from Graham and Stokoe: their worlds are fully-formed. They’ve got their own languages (these guys are boss at coining slang), cultures and unknown histories. They make me want to become an anthropologist just to investigate more about the societies big and small that they’ve invented. Graham’s King City is the most fascinating urban landscape you can possibly imagine, replete with sight gags and puns so good they make a lifelong pun hater into a lover (I HATE PUNS). And his characters, they float on through. That’s the best way I can describe it. Stokoe creates expansive worlds, filthy, messed up planets, and the best recipes that’ll never exist. I’m not done with Orc Stain yet, but the art is something else. I love the hell out of Won Ton Soup and I can’t get enough of the whole badass vagabond chef thing. I hope there’s more to come out of this.

I think what I love most about these two artists and whatever school it is they’re bringing to their work has such a unique attitude and personality to it. If there was ever a set of comics that I could liken to someone playing jazz, it would be these. I’m going to keep rereading them so until I’ve memorized every damn note.

Scalped

Probably the best ongoing that I’m still reading. Scalped is a book about brokenness: the most unfortunate victims of a broken system that failed them from the start, a proud heritage nearly broken by that same system, broken families, promises, dreams, and pretty much everything else. Jason Aaron, R.M. Guera and others have created something remarkable and lasting, a painful, heartbreaking crime drama that somehow manages to be infused with hope. The ongoing plot of this book is one thing, but the true gems of Scalped of the single issue stories about life on the res. Issue #35 is one of those, and it has one of the best pages I’ve seen all year. I won’t waste time getting into it; look at it for a few minutes and then ask yourself why the hell you’re not reading this book already. (Click to enlarge).

The Rise of Arsenal

I’m confident that I’ve said everything I can say about this wonderful book already. My internal monologue reviewed issues #2 and #3 right here and here, I did some jokey analysis of the series in general here, and I wrote it up for ComicsAlliance’s Worst Comics of 2010 list. And then, of course, there’s the sketchbook. My last parting gift to what was easily the most entertaining comic of 2010 is this, one more addition to the sketchbook: Arsenal with Bill the Cat by Nathan Schreiber:

Believe it or not, I’m actually not done writing about this. In my world, there are no dead horses to kick. Only dead cats to love. Wait and see….

Batman: Odyssey

There are many things that I could say about this comic, and I plan to down the line, but for now? This and only this:

Some fast ones:

The Bulletproof Coffin: If you’re not inside it, you’re in the wrong place.

Hellboy & B.P.R.D.: There’s no hype here, no PR machine, no press conferences, no big things happening at cons, no major events, pointless crossovers (Hellboy getting down with Beasts of Burden is anything but pointless), no claims that “nothing will ever be the same again!” even though they keep changing. It’s nothing more than people who are the best continuing to do what they do best.

Gotham Central: The best televised police drama that has never been on TV. And Batman.

Pluto: There are three books that I’ve read in my life that have caused me to have an intense physical reaction while reading them: Crime and Punishment, The World According to Garp, and now this. In the first two examples, the intensity happened during one very specific moment in each book. Pluto had eight volumes, and something gripped me like that while reading each and every one of them.

Superman: Grounded: Typo.

Detroit Metal City: It might be about a sweet singer-songwriter who parades around as an evil metal god, and on that level it’s all kinds of hilarious, but it’s really about that person inside all of us that we never let out and the brilliant things that might happen when we finally do.

Daytripper: The real South American magical realism. Ba and Moon made a thing of beauty, a stunningly gorgeous and heartfelt meditation on the meaning of life and family, and somehow managed not to be pretentious as hell while doing it.

Scott Pilgrim #6: Comics Internet Champion Laura Hudson says everything there is to say right here, and I won’t even attempt to match that. I will say this much: I picked up and read the full run of this comic over the course of this year, and the thing that I love most about this book is the way that Bryan Lee O’Malley draws us in with the cultural trappings of our childhoods only to teach us some really powerful lessons about growing up.

Franken-Castle: I wrote an ode to it right here not too long ago. I don’t even like the Punisher that much, but I ate this up like a 1950′s youngster at a badass monster movie double feature at the matinee. Rick Remender and Tony Moore know exactly what they’re doing (the other artists were great too, of course). Keep following these two. Don’t forget: Monster Punisher flying a dragon mounted with a gun and shooting evil samurai. Don’t ever forget this.

Phonogram: The Singles Club: Good enough to get me way into Brit-pop, and it’ll certainly do the same to you.

Thor: The Mighty Avenger: Go back, look at the facial expressions. That’s it. Marvel is crazy stupid if they don’t see the long-term business potential of releasing the whole thing. I gave it some love in ComicsAlliance’s best of 2010 list right here.

Peepo Choo: If you don’t get the joke, then you’re probably the butt of it.

Grandville: See under Blacksad. Similar brilliance, different flavor, equally delicious.

How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less: I did one hell of a long interview with Sarah Glidden about this book right here, and I’m prouder of that than just about anything I’ve written all year. I left myself and my politics out of the writing, of course. It was an intense and personal read for me, and I’ve been playing with a post here for a while using the backmatter of that interview. She makes that place beautiful, and it is, in its very unique way. But she brings a certain type of person’s certain type of struggle to life, and I hope people use it to start some very necessary conversations.

“Um, actually…you forgot Parker: The Outfit.”

No I didn’t forget it, idiotic imaginary commenter that I’ve fabricated in this post so I can hate you. Darwyn Cooke just created something so perfect that I’m terrified that Parker himself might come out of those pages and kick my ass if my writing isn’t good enough. Read Tucker Stone’s interview with Darwyn here. It’s an essential part of the experience.

_________________

One last thing.

I haven’t been writing for all that long and while I feel pretty good about where it’s gone so far, my voice isn’t there yet. I feel like a pubescent 14 year old whose voice is cracking but every so often he gets a glimpse at how he’ll sound someday (god, this is terrible imagery). I will claim that voice I’m dedicated to that and it’s a promise I’ve made to myself. I love doing this and I’m committed as hell to keep getting better at it. When it’s been good, it’s been a great time. At the very least, I want to be able to give you some healthy belly laughs. At the most? I look forward to finding out.

Hope you’ll stick around, I guess? Oh, and sorry about the weird formatting on the “war of the trenches” entry. Cant seem to fix that for some reason.

Read Sean Witzke. He’s the best.

I haven’t edited this yet.

Are you still here? Did you stick around for the hugs? Here you go:

]]> http://wolkin.com/2011/01/1524/a-year-end-thing/feed/ 2 http://wolkin.com/2010/12/1521/who-is-wolkin/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=who-is-wolkin http://wolkin.com/2010/12/1521/who-is-wolkin/#comments Fri, 17 Dec 2010 21:16:50 +0000 Wolkin http://wolkin.com/?p=1521 Who is Wolkin? I’m not telling you right now. Maybe I’ll tell you later. Maybe not. Do you know already? Do you care? STAY TUNED.

Ok, so look 5 for 8 ain’t bad, and you’d be blown away that I’ve gotten this much done if you had the slightest idea of the week that I’ve had. I hope you’ve enjoyed this; I know I have. And since I didn’t get all 8 posts done, I can tell you that I still have a lot of good stuff to come. It seems like I have more to say about Jews and comics than, I realized, so I’ll keep saying it, but I have zero desire to make that the primary focus of whatever it is that I do on this thing. Enough.

This is a short one, but a nice surprise at the end. There’s things to do.

The Thing #8, by Dan Slott and Kieron Dwyer. This book has a special place in my heart, and for this simple reason, I’m willing to overlook the things about the book that sort of annoy me in the vein of Judaic inaccuracies. And in the interest of time, I’m gonna skip the meat and potatoes of this thing, for the most part. However, it does include a Thing-hosted superhero poker game, where everyone is inexplicably in costume except for the Thing himself. Guess that’s like a hosting rule or something. Then there all these flashbacks of fights he had: Thing and Squirrel Girl take on the Bi-Beast.

That’s right, the Bi-Beast. An editor approved the creation of such nonsense. Hey, it was the 70′s!

Then he fights the Impossible Man or something, then there’s a thing with the Dalai Lama maybe?

And then, well, he decides to have a second Bar Mitzvah to celebrate 13 years since he got his powers. Seems a little iffy, but I’ll take it. Anyways, other than the nebbishy rabbi (if you know anything about me, you know this bugs me.), the one issue is with Ben’s little Bar Mitzvah speech. He talks about his Torah portion, and says it’s from the story of Job. This is a problem.

The Book of Job is not a part of the Five Books of Moses, and therefore would never be chanted as a Torah portion. It is chanted sometimes, though. Also, I’m shocked that he would use Job as a parallel to his own life at all. Job was a guy who God literally messed with just to see what would happen (Religion, everyone!); Ben Grimm was a fighter pilot who yes, lost his handsome looks, but then got to be one of the world’s greatest adventurers with his best friends. Helluva trade-off. Yeah studying Job makes him realize that he’s got it pretty good, but man, how many Thing stories are there where he’s dealing with this? Can’t we get him an off-panel therapist or something or be done with it?

Therapy: that’s pretty Jewish, right? (GAAHHHH STEREOTYPES EVEN THOUGH I TOTALLY SEE A THERAPIST TOO.)

Anyways, here’s why I love this book so much. See this place where Ben Grimm celebrated his second Bar Mitzvah?

That’s where I work.

So I may be short by a day or so on my 8 nights, but here’s a little extra so fill in the blanks: I had a piece up today on ComicsAlliance with their first-ever Chanukah gift list! I think it’s a pretty decent list of Jewish comics, if a little bit incomplete and it’s extra special because of the stupid comments.

Moving on…

Tonight’s installment pulls from everyone’s favorite thing: the Marvel Holiday Special!!! We’re not always lucky enough to get a Chanukah story in one of these, but 1993 was an exception, with a Peter David-penned tale of Leonard “Doc” “I’m the craziest psychologist alive” Samson visiting a classroom at a Yeshiva to tell the students the story of Chanukah.

Two quick things: interesting to see a co-ed classroom in a Yeshiva, which is traditionally an Orthodox learning institution. Boys and girls learning Jewish things together? That doesn’t happen so much. Also weird that they don’t know anything about Chanukah yet.

In fact, these kids don’t seem to know anything at all:

These are some of the most downright stupid Yeshiva students I’ve ever seen in my life. Any why hasn’t anyone pointed out that Doc Samson is dressed extremely immodestly? The kids are all up in the nice clothes and Doc is wearing…something that I don’t have the language to describe. Im any event, it’s clear that his classroom management skills are lacking. What is also clear is that their teacher is terrible.

Those are maccaroons, you stupid little child. Why didn’t Mrs. Klein tell you that?

Samson realizes that he’s not going to hold the kids’ attention so well by telling them the actual story, so he basically just starts making it up. I have to admit, I prefer the hell out of his version.

Guys, that is main Chanukah bad Antiochus IV Epiphanes as Ultron. Ultron. Let’s remember that just a page ago, Doc told the kids they didn’t have cable TV back then. So why are none of these precociously ignorant little fools asking how it’s possible that they had robots, but no TV? That’s a question that matters. That’s a question that matters to nobody but me at 10:00PM on a Monday.

Then he tells the kids that the Maccabees killed Antiochus with a nuke. Okay, I’ll take that. But then…

As the story goes, the Syrian-Greeks desecrated the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem and placed idols within. A big piece of what Chanukah celebrates is the rededication of the Temple following their victory over the baddies. The way Samson is telling it, the Temple was turned into Graceland. And let me tell you something, friends: if that had actually happened, I don’t think we would have fought that at all. Because if Judaism had become an Elvis-based faith, that would be just fantastic.

Then Samson moves on to explaining the miracle of the oil. Now that all bets are off in terms of historical accuracy, one of the students offers his own interpretation of what went down, because after hearing about the gun-toting commandos who nuked a robot so they could clear elvis paintings out of their temple, he finds the idea that the oil lasted for 8 nights a little bit too hard to believe.

Like I said, these kids are idiots.

But here’s the thing: Judaism is an interpretive culture. And this kid offers one of the best Midrashim (for lack of a better term: rabbinic interpretation of  the Torah that slightly resembles fan fiction, but is generally less creepy) ever. Check it out:

That kid has a strong future ahead of him in he non-existent field of Theoretical Rabbinics. I’m pretty sure that no such field exists, and having just googled it to confirm that it’s nowhere else on the Internet, someone needs to go out an invent it now. On a related note, I’m excited that I’m about to become the only result that comes up when you google the term “Theoretical Rabbinics”.

You know who isn’t as excited about this kid’s interpretation as I am? That would be Doc Samson!!!

That’s not how you talk to children, Leonard

In recent issues of Hulk, it turned out that Doc Samson’s mind had actually fractured into three separate personalities (check the wikipedia link for more info if you care that much), and it looks like Peter David actually gave us some early examples of Leonard’s fraying psyche. Educating through implicit threats of violence? That’s no way for a superhero to act. Or perhaps it’s the only way for a superhero to act, as in “You will learn not to commit crimes or else I will punch you.”

Ultimately, Mrs. Klein comes to regret inviting her former student to visit the class, and drops what I’d probably call a second degree burn on Samson. It’s not sick, but it certainly cuts to the heart of things.

Let’s bring this around a little bit and relate it to the work that I do. I love that this story was inspired by something real that happened during Peter David’s Hebrew School days, even though I don’t get why they changed the setting to a Yeshiva, which typically involves much more intensive levels of Jewish learning, even among kids who are in the first grade. I suppose it’s possible that David’s Hebrew School was referred to as a Yeshiva.

I’m struck by the fact that this story involves someone feeling like they had to spruce up a piece of Jewish history that could be presented as a Jewish version of 300, except we win at the end. It’s about Jewish guerillas fighting a conquering army and winning (maybe it’s Red Dawn, then?). I mean, that’s the simple version.

The real version is a whole lot uglier than that, which is something that you never really are able to easily get into when you’re teaching kids about the holiday. And the whole miracle of the oil thing? That never happened. But that’s the biggest piece of the story that’s told to children. I’ve always found this to be unfortunate, but it’s one of the many challenges of working in an educational field that deals with teaching history and myth and allowing them to overlap so much of the time.

Here’s my buddy Eli Valley with the real story. Can’t really share that with the kids, can we now?

I have to open this up by way of an embarrassing confession. I remember the Wednesday when James Sturm’s Market Day first hit comic stores. My man at my local spot called my attention to it, reminding me that the real stuff is the real stuff and there ain’t no amount of blood-vomiting supervillains that’s gonna change that. I certainly wouldn’t dispute the talent of someone like Sturm (EVER), but I took one look at the cover and basically said “as much as I love this guy, I’ve read enough stories about bearded old Jewish fellas for now.”

I can be an idiot sometimes.

Sure, that was one hell of a mistake, but the fact that I’m sitting up here late at night should make it clear that I’ve made good on it since then. I read this book. I read it again. I love it. I think it’s a goddamn masterpiece, and while I haven’t gone and looked back over everything I’ve read this year, Market Day is easily in my top three of 2010.

I have what I like to think of as a sort of imagined nostalgia for certain times and places that I’ve never lived through or even seen. The first time I became aware of this feeling was when I read James Robinson and Tony Harris’s Starman. Any time Jack Knight would talk about old things, I would feel a sense of loss, absence, a desire to remember things that were never a part of my past. This sort of feeling has also functioned as a part of my Jewishness. For example, I want to truly remember the Lower East side of the early 20th century, to listen to Yiddish radio, eat some pastrami at the 2nd Avenue Deli before it was a historical and cultural landmark and it was just a place to get some good kosher food. When it was still on 2nd Avenue, for that matter.  I’ve also always had this weird longing to live in the world of the shtetl. These are the types of thoughts that made me realize that a sense of Jewish cultural memory is a very real thing for me.

It’s nothing new to say that a powerful piece of storytelling art can transport you to another world, fictional, historical or otherwise. But I think it’s something else entirely when that work brings the world of your ancestors to life in a very real way. This is one of the many incredible things that Market Day has done for me. There are many stories about Jews in shtetls, but there is something in here that overwhelms me with a sense of authenticity, even more than actual photos that I’ve seen from the time. I practically felt myself standing in this man’s home when I opened to the first page of the book:

(sorry for the off-kilter scans. I had a tough time here, and I didn’t want to mess with the binding.)

Simple summary: The book follows a few short days in the life of Mendleman, a dedicated rugmaker who’s doing his best to earn a living for his family. As he goes to the village center for the titular “Market Day,” to sell his wares along with the other craftsman, he discovers that his favorite merchant has no need for his wares and the only store that will buy his rugs is a sort of “mega-merchant” that buys and sells everybody’s handmade stuff for cheap. This shift in the economic status quo threatens to throw Mendleman’s entire life into disarray, and much of the book is spent dealing with the implications of this.

The other day, I wrote about how Jews can easily be poorly misrepresented in superhero comics. I think a part of what gets me there is that it usually results from an attempt to take a character or a story and to sort of “make it Jewish,” for whatever reason. Market Day is the quality counterpoint to this approach. Make no mistake, this is a story about a Jewish guy in a Jewish town surrounded by fellow Jews. Sturm likes to tell stories about Jews and he’s great at it. Like I said, authenticity. But what’s great about Market Day is the fact that it achieves what’s best about a classic Jewish folktale: it utilizes a Jewish story to get into issues that relate to everyone.

You know why Fiddler on the Roof is so universally beloved? It’s simply because the central themes are universal, not Jewish. It’s about duty to family, tradition and change, assimilation and love. In an era when so many of our families’ histories have been defined by the immigrant experience (even though no one really immigrates in Fiddler), the struggle to abandon the old ways in changing times and places is clearly resonant for so many people.

That’s how I read Market Day. That “mega merchant” that I mentioned in my summary? It’s Target and Walmart, it may also be Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods. It’s a place where the work of anyone who cares about his or her craft is replaced by cheap crap. The big new shop gets richer, people save money and an art form dies, whether it’s a rug or even a handcrafted chair. The world that we live in today isn’t so dissimilar: we buy cheap, factory-made furniture because it’s all we can really afford and anyways, it looks just as good and it makes more sense. Sure that chair might be  work of art considering the way it was made, but why don’t I just spend my hard-earned money on actual art that I can hang on my wall?

Sturm does a really great job of reminding us that Mendleman doesn’t simply weave rugs; for him, it truly is an art-form, an act of divinely-inspired creation. He sees possibilities for new designs in everything, from the sunrise to a crowd of men in the market. This moment of inspiration is one of the few moments that Sturm allows his art to move into abstraction as we see the process by which Mendleman sees a new rug come to life in his mind, and the effect is pretty great. Check it out:

(This is the first of a two-page sequence. I can’t give you everything here, can I? No.)

Here’s a quote from Mendleman that immediately precedes this page:

Something as common as a rug can indeed embody the gifts and miracles of God – the first steps of one’s child, the moment Sabbath begins, or the glorious bustle of Market Day.

This read as such a powerful reminder of one of the messages of this book. In our materialistic world, the desire for more stuff, cheaper, faster, whatever. It’s resulted in a world where almost everything could be reduced to crap. Mendleman’s world shows us that when we invest our hearts and souls in the act of creation, then anything we make can achieve a higher value than the simple object that it becomes. We’ve lost our sense of that. Ironically, the objects in my life that I care most about tend to be the ones that induce a sense of fax nostalgia in me as well, but that’s neither here nor there.

So here’s this:

I love this page. I love the warmth of the rabbi, the humility that he brings to his interaction with Mendleman. But what I love the most is the aside about the rug. What a singular and unique creation, emerging from a simple discussion about the minutae of Jewish observance. If you’re a religious Jew today, you have sunrise/sundown schedules, and you can put every lightswitch in your house on a timer. I’m not even observant of the Sabbath in the traditional sense anymore, but that rug makes me want to live in a time and a place where I would have been because everyone was. How could I not long for a time and place with the moments like this? (Yes, I recognize that this is in fact a story about a man’s life potentially falling apart, but still.)

One last thing, even though I have so much more to say that I’m working on figuring out. One of the things that I love most about this book is that it treats it’s Jewish subjects with honesty. I can’t stand it when characters like this are idealized because it takes them back down to stereotype. The religious Jewish guy in the story who does nothing but pray and stroke his beard, I don’t feel it. But Sturm creates a world that goes beyond the humble rabbi (yes, I love him. placed in another story by a creator less gifted than Sturm, he could have easily come off that bad way too, but he doesn’t because of the context that surrounds him) and shows us a Jewish world where late at night you can find a bunch of drunk old Jews, black hats, beards and all, hanging out under a bridge late at night and telling dirty jokes. Because no matter how religious they might be, they’re still people. The stories we tell ourselves, right? Honesty, honesty, honesty, I can’t get enough of it. Mendleman goes on a bender at some point himself. I’d say that the aftermath of it is one of the most beautiful pages in the book, but it’s pretty hard for me to make such a distinction with this level of art. I’m just a big fan of the this approach to a page, gridding a single image.

I’m grateful to James Sturm for this book, for invoking the spirit of Sholem Aleichem, for bringing the Jewish folktale back to life with what I believe to be the best medium for such a task (I’m heavily biased),  especially because most of us don’t remember this world anymore. Our great-grandparents are gone, and the shtetl lives in our stories and nothing more. I’m grateful that this is a story for everyone, not just Jews. I hope my friends can read this book and appreciate the universal resonance that I see (it’s totally there), but I also hope that they’ll see why I want be in that place, if only for a day, so I can come back here and tell my children and grandchildren stories about how it used to be.

Ragman: Suit of Souls #1

By Christos N. Gage and Steven Segovia

A Note for the Reader: There is only one way to properly read this comic. First you must develop serious issues with your mother, a la Portnoy’s Complaint. Then you must have a Bar or Bat Mitzvah. You should not have the meaningful kind, though. You should have the kind that focuses on the party instead of the meaning, and none of your relative should get along with each other none of them. This should be the type of event that brings out the worst in your loved ones, leading you to question what it even means to have a Bar Mitzvah. But then you should realize that there is no such thing as “having” a Bar Mitzvah. A Bar Mitzvah is something that you become. Then you should go on an Israel trip, come home and find a non-Jewish dating partner, stop talking to your parents for a while and find a good therapist or something. And then finally, just as you think you’re finally ready to read this comic, read “The Chosen” by Chaim Potok, watched Yentl once, Fiddler on the Roof Twice and Schindler’s List three times.

Oh man I can’t wait to get into this comic because I am a pretty Jewish guy and the word on the street is that this Ragman fellow is also a pretty Jewish guy. Ha ha Actually there is no word on the street because this is a comic about Ragman its as if someone at DC decided they’d throw a bone to that one guy on the Internet who has to blog about every single appearance of a Jewish person in a comic book I AM NOT THAT GUY I SWEAR.

Aww yeah panel one and I’m pretty sure we’re starting with a rabbi and if you wanna let folks know that things are going to be pretty Jewish you throw a rabbi in there and I guess I’m okay with this since I know me some rabbis heck I WAS CONCEIVED BY A RABBI true story but this isn’t about my father issues today my friends this is about Rory Ragman Regan’s father issues, isn’t it?

Told you sooooooo. See there ain’t nothing but two different kinds of stories that you be seeing there’s the ones where everybody hates us Jews and then there’s the ones where we hate ourselves more than anyone else ever could. Also let’s take a random sampling of some of the words and phrases found on the first page of this here comic about a Jewish guy:

1. Rabbi
2. Ku Klux Klan
3. Jewish
4. Hate
5. Psychiatrist
6. Tradition

That pretty much says it all right there but we still have 21 more pages to go so let me just turn this page oh god it’s Ragman it’s a guy who wears a suit of patches that are made out of people’s souls. I guess I should have expected this given that the name of this thing is Ragman but I was hoping to avoid this getting stupid so quickly then again that already happened on page one my god but Daniel Craig is hell of sexy as James Bond I was just talking about this with my mother a couple of minutes ago is that weird? However if you’re wondering how a person can hate himself so much I’d say a pretty good answer would be getting turned into a superhero who is forced to wear a suit of souls that makes him look like a vagrant. Sound about right?

Let’s see here page three is just Ragman complaining to this rabbi and I can’t be paid to care what this guy is whining about but the rabbi is wearing a yarmulke like there’s supposed to be a propeller on top of it or something and I’ve seen a lot of rabbis in my day but not a single one who wears their business like this it’s just not done folks good god but I have this terrible fear that I’m why am I turning the page POOR RAGMAN DIDN’T KNOW HE WAS JEWISH UNTIL HE WAS SIXTEEN YEARS OLD ARE WE SUPPOSED TO FEEL SAD THAT HE GOT TO SKIP HEBREW SCHOOL?

Hey, guys there’s like 3,000 years worth of Jewish folklore out there but no one ever seems to look into it when they’re writing these stories instead they all go right back to the same story with a technique that I like to refer to as “Stroking the Golem“. Anyways we should probably pull some key terms from this page too:

• Prague
• Ghetto
• Blood Libel
• Blood of Christian children
• Passover Seder
• Golem

Guy we are on a roll here we’ve got persecution and anti-Semitism and suffering and this is following the key rules of writing a classic Jewish story here because four pages in and we’ve already established nebbishy rabbi and hate hate hate. So if this were All Star Superman hey Superman is totally Jewish isn’t he, right? Isn’t he like Moses, right SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP if this were like that then the opening page would read something like this:

Anti-Semitism. Self-loathing. Horrible costume. Kindly rabbi.

Anyways I’m all pagey turney and then there’s more of this origin and it seems that Ragman is some kind of alternate Golem because if you make a man out of stone sometimes he will kill things if you don’t want him to this is known as the Flaw of the Jewish Homunculus there is no such thing never mind but what I’m learning here is that a council of rabbis apparently decided on this Ragman nonsense. You mean to tell me that a quorum of highly-learned Jewish fellas put their heads together and this is the best they could come up with? I can just imagine their conversation about this wait I need to look something up on wikipedia real quick OH MY GOD JIMMY WALES GET OUT OF MY COMPUTER WHY CAN’T I ESCAPE YOU JIMMY WALES?

“Guys, I’ve got an idea for how we do a new Golem thing. I call it Ragman.”

“Ragman?”

“Sure, it’s like this. We make a suit out of rags. And the rags are made of souls.”

“That doesn’t really sound any better than the whole Blood Libel thing, does it?”

Actually, hold the phone. You know what? I don’t want to do it this way. I’ll leave my internal monologue nonsense for another time.

First things first: Ragman’s history as a character is downright ridiculous. He wasn’t originally intended to be Jewish, but rather Irish, but in today’s continuity, this is who he is. That being said, this comic is a clear and honest attempt to add some substance to his background as a Jewish character. And I respect that, even if I have some serious problems with it, because this story draws on so much that’s ugly and painful about my heritage (see the key phrases above) in order to construct the beginnings of a meaningful Jewish identity out of Ragman. It’s unfortunate too, because Gage is one of my favorite writers today, and I’ve completely loved every single other comic I’ve ever seen from him except for this. So I am not being a hater here. I love way the he can cut to the heart of a character, and he clearly sought to do it here. I don’t know if Gage is Jewish or how well-versed he is in Judaism, but it appears that he drew on some fairly popular themes, tropes and understandings in order to construct this story. I suppose I just wish it had been a different one.

Long story short, in this comic, Ragman goes to the rabbi in an attempt to figure out why his father (who wore the costume before him) changed his name into one that didn’t sound Jewish, abandoned his identity as a Jew and hid it from his son. As it turns out, Dad was Ragman during WWII, was helping fellow Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, and was forced to flee the ghetto during the Uprising, when the souls in his suit took control. Here is where personal conflicts arise, and where my problems come up. But before I go any further, I don’t want to minimize the Holocaust in any way; I appreciate the idea of imagining a Jewish superhero defending Jews during this horrible time in our history, but it makes me uncomfortable here.

But let’s move on to my problems. They’re largely representational, as in “what is the Judaism that is being represented in this comic?”. The first red flag was the rabbi. Let’s take a look at this guy:

I’ve spent an insane amount of time around many rabbis in my life and most of them don’t look much like this at all, so I’m always struck by the fact that give or take a black hat and a beard, they almost always look like this in the media. Except I wasn’t kidding when I joked before that a rabbi probably wouldn’t wear his yarmulke that way. Am I nit-picking? Being oversensitive? Sure, but it’s my heritage on the page here; I’d just be delighted to see it reflect the incredibly diverse reality that I’ve come to know as a liberal Jewish guy in contemporary society.

Now let’s get to two more panels. I’ll put them side by side. They represent the before and after of Rory’s attempt to understand his father:

Guilt and shame, my friends, with a little twist of self-loathing. What could be more Jewish than that?

Many things can be, but this is what I see all of the time, this dialectic of shame/unworthiness. And this is what anyone else who read this comic will see, for better or for worse. Sure, the book ends on a positive note with Rory getting some closure on his father and a renewed sense of understanding in terms of his Jewish identity, but I doubt that will ever be explored any further in a meaningful way. So we basically just have another guy who feels messed up about being Jewish. As a guy who personally feels messed up about being Jewish from time to time, and has consumed so many stories about people just like me, this is a moment when I think back to the quote in my last post about how the stories we tell ourselves effectively create our realities. I need to be telling myself stories that are more filled with hope, and embracing the limitless beauty of Judaism instead of the ones the remind me about the Blood Libel, the KKK, and the wondrous possibilities of guilt.

I need to get to the best part of this. How does Rory discover the truth about his father? It just so happens that one of the souls contained in his Ragman suit is that of one Jaeger Brandt a former Nazi soldier who participated in the atrocities of the Holocaust and has spent the years since in relative purgatory as a part of the Ragman suit. This guy was one of the souls who helped to take control of Rory’s father during the uprising, and forced him to abandon the Jews that he was protecting. Brandt is the one who reveals the truth about what happened to his father during those painful years, and it’s his voice in the panel on the right side seen above. Here’s what happens immediately after that panel:

(sorry for the insane size of the picture here. im tired. shut up.)

Just so we’re all clear on what’s happening here, Nazi soldier Jaeger Brandt is getting to go to Heaven after helping young Jewish guy Rory Regan realize that his father was not ashamed to be Jewish, but didn’t feel worthy of being a Jew. Rory Regan’s father did not feel worthy of being a Jew as a result of actions for which he was not responsible in any way. However, Brandy bears at least partial responsibility for causing those actions. And now he achieves redemption by telling Rory about it. He even points out how easy it was.

I don’t really know what to say about that, but for so many reasons, I just don’t want to see a Nazi getting an easy ticket to heaven in a comic that’s ostensibly supposed to be about a Jewish person reclaiming his identity. It’s the inexplicable icing on a kosher cake that, like many kosher baked goods, just leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

The resources are out there to draw on so many other aspects of Judaism to create powerful, positive and relevant stories about mainstream (I know, Ragman) Jewish superheroes. All I’m saying is that I’d love to see our writers take advantage. It’s a one-off story, you know? It’s totally doable.

All that being said, I’m still not entirely sure that it’s possible to create a fully-formed Jewish superhero of mass appeal with the depth of identity that someone like me might like to see. Actually, Peter Parker would totally work as a young Orthodox Jew. But I’m dangerously close to drifting back to rambling and anyways, that’s a story for another time.

Stories are how people make sense of themselves and their worlds. In young children’s spontaneous stories that they act out as they play, we can see how they believe people related to one another, who they hope to become, and how they will behave. We can see adolescents play roles in their own and other people’s stories in order to figure out where they fit into their ever-expanding worlds. As adults, the true and imaginary stories we wish to tell and believe suggest what we value most in the world. In a real sense, stories make people.

-From text, lies and videotape: stories about life, literacy, & learning, by Patrick Shannon

I discovered the quote above when I was researching my graduate thesis about 3 years ago and it’s become central to my personal philosophy ever since then. I love stories. I love telling them, hearing them, breaking them down, questioning the way they’re told, and delving into what say about the people who create and communicate them. I think it goes without saying that my love for comics plays a huge role in that, as does my love for Judaism.

There are a number of times when I allow those two loves to come together. My graduate thesis is a perfect example, which I may discuss here someday once I’ve decided to go the boring route with this here website. I say this because that particular piece of writing is like 80 pages of verbal Ambien and while I’m proud of it, I have no desire to inflict it upon the rest of you.

You may have also heard that Jews and Comics is like, a thing. Many folks in my world love to discuss this, and while I initially was excited about the role that members of my extended community/family have played in the development of the comics medium, I’ve grown tired of certain aspects of the conversation. There’s only so many times that someone can ask me if I’ve read Kavalier and Clay (I have) or feel like they need to tell me that “Oh my God Superman is totally Jewish he’s like Moses did you know that?” (I’m not sure I care anymore).

I have a lot of problems with the way this has been approached by a number of people and I don’t feel comfortable naming them here because my world is a small world and it’ll bite me in the ass. I’m far more interested in the general intersection of religious themes and comics, and people like A. David Lewis and his contemporaries are doing great work in that area as far as I’m concerned. The other big thing is the fascinating resonance between storytelling devices in mainstream comics culture like the retcon and fanfic (I know, I know) and works of classical rabbinic literature like Midrash.

However.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t want to address Jews and Judaism in comics in my own way, and so I’m going to attempt to use the 8 Nights of Chanukah as a time to do so. I have an overall concern with the representations of Jews and Jewish identity in comics (especially superhero comics) that I find to be problematic and lacking. At the same time, there have been some incredible works that speak to a sort of classical Jewish sensibility while telling stories of universal relevance.

What I was trying to say there is that the recent Ragman one-shot was pretty frustrating to me while James Sturm’s Market Day made my heart soar. Market Day will be covered later on, but the first post you’ll see after this one will be some thoughts on Ragman, which you can expect later this (Wednesday) evening.

So I hope you’ll join me (and I hope I can keep up! it’s a pretty crazy week for me.) as I get into some of the best and worst in Jewish comics (or “Semitiquential Art” as my young friend Max likes to call it). I also plan to share some thoughts on how I’ve occasionally worked comics into my own teaching, because I’m the only person in the world who has ever used a Let’s Be Friends Again strip to teach a rabbi. That’s facts.

You’ll get all the different versions of my fractured mind on two of  my favorite things, and maybe you’ll learn something along the way. I mean, I am a teacher and everything.

Like you see in the quote, the stories we tell ourselves and how we tell them are really important. As a Jewish guy who loves comics, I care deeply about the potential for these stories to offer new ways of thinking about ourselves as Jews and inviting others to do the same, rather than tying us down to the old ones. We can honor our past without abandoning it, or rehashing it endlessly until it loses all meaning. I’m being deliberately vague here, but put simply, we create our truths out of the stories we tell. Let’s make sure that we’re telling the right ones.

Finally: WHY WON’T MARVEL COMICS SEE THE OBVIOUS LICENSING OPPORTUNITY IN MAKING A DR. OCTOPUS MENORAH? THAT SHOULD SEEM OBVIOUS TO US ALL, SHOULDN’T IT? I DON’T REALLY SEE WHY I HAVE TO ASK FOR SOMETHING LIKE THIS SINCE THERE SHOULD BE SOMEONE AT MARVEL WHO GETS PAID TO THINK OF THESE THINGS.

SERIOUSLY, MARVEL. CALL ME. ON THE TELEPHONE.

Things have been nuts in the real world, but I promise you that I been working on some great writing for this here website. I’d tell you to be patient, but I’m inclined to doubt that no one is sitting around waiting.

OH NO LOOK AT ME I AM BEING SELF-DEPRECATING AND FISHING FOR COMPLIMENTS POOR ME POOR WOLKIN.

(Click here for the Mustache Archive.)